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Summary The Syrian rebels have been alleged of targeting big businessmen for extortion.
Top Syrian businessman Fares Shehabi says he lives in constant fear of being kidnapped by rebels fighting loyalist forces for control of his home city Aleppo. But he clings on in the city, saying it is his duty to try to keep its economy running.I was attacked three or four times and they tried to kidnap me many times, said Shehabi, 40, scion of a wealthy merchant family with interests ranging from pharmaceuticals and food to real estate and banking.In one attack, assailants riddled one of his factories with gunfire and tried to plant explosives in it, he said. He now moves around with bodyguards, sometimes in disguise.Nineteen months into the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad, Syrias biggest city and main industrial centre has been crippled by the fighting. Located among the olive groves and pistachio trees of northwest Syria, it has a population of about 3 million in peacetime.In addition to widespread damage to factories and shops and an exodus of refugees from neighbourhoods caught in the fighting, Aleppos community of businessmen and industrialists has been hit hard. Some of the wealthiest are linked to Assads government through partnerships with officials.Many have fled with their families to places such as Lebanon, Dubai and Egypt. Others have stayed, but say they are targets of violence, extortion and kidnapping attempts by rebel groups and government-linked gangs known as shabiha.The businessmen developed Aleppo into Syrias economic engine, the focus of its export trade and the seat of its pharmaceutical, textile and plastics industries. So the damage to the merchant class bodes ill for a recovery of the Syrian economy when the fighting eventually ends.Armed groups in Aleppo are attacking every businessman, small or big, whether he has a factory or a workshop, if he does not want to meet their demands and buy them weapons, Shehabi said by telephone from the city.Aleppos business community dates back many centuries, to when the city was a trading centre on the Silk Road between East and West.In recent years it has been seen as a bastion of loyalty to Assads rule; some of its members were accused of financing loyalist thugs who attacked demonstrators in the early days of the uprising.
